there is a theory for everything & all of them start
with the moon on fire. the moon is my ancestor
but I don’t know it yet. the moon
lights up my skin like a love scene
in movies where every girl is a bird
winging out of a wound, every girl
stitches a map onto her eyelids
leading out of her body. how
many genres of appetite, how
many ways to be hungered: meat
me where you want me, carve
my hamhips to handholds & tender
my lips leaking light
the color of thigh
fat, I noise myself into your mouth,
the kind of scream that rips
a thumb out by its root. boys
prove their hardness by planting
themselves like knives into prey
bodies, pray bodies
are more than their hearts stuffed
and feathered, their hearts pitted
at the center: a fingersized hole
where the moon used to be. it is natural
to fear ghosts and the memories
of boys. to give birth to a fist
and lick it bald. I take ghosts
by the lungful, pass them
like breaths, a body adapts
to all the bodies inside it, so many
you name me a slaughterhouse. the
hands that delivered me
I felled like soft fruit, I have learned
the meaning of harvest: to cull
the doors from the house, reveal
the room racked with all my lost teeth
& bite the hand that is fed to me.
ethnography
there is a theory for everything
& I am the butcher in all of them. I tally the bones, ferment the blood, host every shadow in my marrow. I boil manhoods in my mouth. I exile meat from its skin, let new names claim my mouth like a country. Every theory is a story and all of them begin: he opened her wide for the dawn to crawl in. She bled like a dog. And all of them begin: she wore war like a moon between her ribs, tongued her mother out of a block of ice, let her melt. A flood for 3 days and 3 nights. Who says water is safer than land. Every daughter a new way water can take from us. She takes the light onto her tongue , cools it. She womanizes war into a wreck of dresses, an empty sink, nipples unmarked, graves. She set fire to her hands, brightest bouquets. It’s a wedding now. The butcher is getting married, her dress the color closest to blood, her bridegroom skewered between her thighs, meat the man. Listen. In every story, the butcher is an archivist. Breaks every jaw in the shop just to wire it to sing again.
Kristin Chang is from California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), Nailed Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, Souvenir Lit, and elsewhere. She is currently on staff at Winter Tangerine and can be found at moonflock.tumblr.com.
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